A Little Christmas Mystery

Over Christmas this year I brought a little “treat” candy dish and a small fiber-optic tree to work for the corner of my desk and a couple bags of Hershey’s kisses for the candy dish.

It wasn’t long before we had a bit of a mystery. Several mornings I opened my office to find a neat little pile of foil pieces on the floor next to the wall. I was sure someone was messing with me... the little pile was so neat and in such an odd place.

This mystery continued for several weeks. We batted around different theories of who or what could be getting into the chocolate. Daryl was in my office very early one morning and realized that my phone cord had been chewed through! There was indeed a small pile of little foil pieces from the kisses between my desk and the wall where the phone cord was strung so were sure that at the very least, we had a mouse.

Now I was feeling (a little) bad that I had accused certain (suspicious) people of leaving the trash from their kisses behind, and even though the phone cord HAD been chewed through I wasn’t completely convinced the little piles were from a mouse. That seemed to be way too “neat” - besides, we hadn’t found any mouse poop which is ALWAYS a tell-tale

sign.

Daryl set a line of glue traps between my desk and the wall, baited with kisses. One morning he opened my door to find that one of the traps had been drug to the MIDDLE OF THE FLOOR leaving a clump of hair but the mouse had gotten free. He then set out the old-fashioned completely reliable spring traps, again baited with kisses and covered the suspect areas well - 3 traps in a row! We only caught 1 but are pretty sure the one that got away probably died under the floor later on; the odor was unmistakable.

A few weeks ago I was in a cleaning and organizing mood and decided to hook up one of the old printer/scanners that had been on the floor in my office for a couple months. I picked the newer of the 2, installed it, but received an error message saying I needed to clear the ink carriage path. I was blown away by what I found when I opened the cover!

It’s kind of hard to tell in these pictures (taken with my phone), but when I opened the printer it was full of kisses! Some were completely wrapped, some were unwrapped and partially eaten, and there were little bits of foil and the Hershey flags EVERYwhere! It was so funny - they were lined up on the rail behind the ink carriage as if someone very carefully set them there!

Over the next several days we took the printer apart and did our best to dig out chocolate, foil, paper, and even pieces of some cracker-type cookies that I'd had at one time. I would have liked nothing better than to get it working. Although I think we’d gotten out all the junk, some of the sensors were probably damaged and we eventually had to throw in the towel and admit defeat.

Isn't this a crazy amount of stuff??